This is a blog devoted to researching the cognitive effects of Virtual and Augmented Reality.
Our Research Question is - "How can synthetic embodied VR/AR environments enhance aspects of human cognition?"
The blog shows outcomes of our research projects, such as papers, videos, paper reviews and other useful artifacts.

Presence, the psychological experience of “being there,” is an important construct to consider when investigating the impact of mediated experiences on cognition. Though several studies have investigated the influence of presence on the memory of virtual environments (i.e. recalling virtual objects), few have tested how presence impacts memory on subsequent tasks in the physical world. Thirty-three male and female college students were exposed to a pro-environmental message in an immersive virtual environment. After the virtual reality treatment, they completed a memory task in the physical world regarding pro-environmental principles. Results showed a significant negative association between levels of reported presence in the virtual world and the number of correct water conservation examples remembered in the physical world. These findings suggest that media technology that induces presence can influence an individual’s ability to remember information in the physical world. Possible theoretical explanations of how presence may negatively impact cognition are presented.

#Comments#

Here they seek to relate a specific component of VW to memory, viz., presence or subjective levels of being there, with memory recall in cueing experiments.

They use a nVisor SX111 HMD (NVIS, Reston, VA) with a
resolution of 2056 x 1024 and a refresh rate of 120
frames per second to perform the work, framerate is very high compared to Oculus, which may improve presence? Need to keep this in mind.

Experiment context is that the task involved an environmental narrative, so emotional resonance with such a concept could be a factor here as well. Does it work the same with other more humdrum narratives?

They also look at free recall and cued recall, so the memory tests are of a different type in each case to cover possibly differing memory processes.

Note they get a NEGATIVE correlation with memory and presence (n=33). This needs to be considered for my experiments. It would be interesting to see if a comparison with desktop levels of presence will map to my other results with Unity and Metasonic?!?!?

3. People who report high levels of presence actually remember things using different processes, and so are actually a different subject group, so could be a confounding factor that needs to be controlled.

4. Only correlational experiment, no details on causation, so needs further work.

An interesting result, bring out many research questions to answer on the relationship of VW elements with cognitive processes.

Previous work on human memory has shown that prompting participants with false events and self-relevant information via different types of media such as narratives, edited 2-dimensional
images, and mental imagery creates false memories. This study
tested a new form of media for studying false memory formation: Immersive Virtual Environment Technology (IVET). Using this
tool, we examined how memory was affected by viewing dynamic
simulations of avatars performing novel actions. In the study,
55 preschool and elementary children were randomly assigned
to 1 of 4 memory prompt conditions (idle, mental imagery, IVET
simulation of another child, or IVET simulation of self). Each
child was questioned 3 different times: once before the memory
prompt, once immediately after the memory prompt, and once
approximately 5 days after the memory prompt. Results showed
that preschool children were equally likely to develop false memories regardless of memory prompt condition. But, for elementary
children, the mental imagery and IVET self conditions caused
significantly more false memories than the idle condition. Implications regarding the use of digital media in courtroom settings,
clinical therapy settings, entertainment, and other applications are
discussed.

#Comments#

Interesting, another acronym - Immersive
Virtual Environment Technology (IVET). I don't like it, prefer 3D virtual worlds. But I guess the use of immersive is pertinent here.

Note here that experiments were performed with children, not adults. They state that the vulnerability of preschool children to suggestive influences is very high, so may not apply to adults.

They also bring up the source monitoring judgement as an experimental task; viz. the identification of sources of memories, and how it is actually poorly managed on the part of the brain.

They also state that narratives are commonly used to test false memories. Are these analogous to workflows, and the place of false memories in elicitation?!?!?

Conjecture: Is the imposition of a process a form of false memory imputation over the actuality of the work processes in an enterprise? Or, for any elicitation process for that matter? Thus the more real the stimuli, the more likely to get the truth? Possible research question here.

They note that narrative information previously used in experiments is not that rich. The media richness theory suggests a greater effect from IVETs.

Interesting passage:

"In another set of studies, college students heard simple action statements
and in some conditions either performed or imagined the action as well (Goff
& Roediger, 1998). In a second session, participants imagined performing
actions (some of which came from the first session and some of which
were new) either one, three, or five times. In the third session, participants
were asked to identify actions only if they had occurred in the first session and, if identified, to tell whether the action statement had been carried
out, imagined, or merely heard. The main finding was that increasing the
number of imaginings during the second session caused participants to later
remember that they had performed an action during the first session when
in fact the participant had not."Note the influence of imagination over the actual memory of a performed event. This seems to hold across familiar and non-familiar actions - relevant to knowledge elicitation. If you get people to imagine badly, they will report badly.They also note the power of imaging past actions; very close and personal stimuli and feedback interactions in the person's head. May be part of a feedback loop.Another key factor here:

"We believe that the manipulation explored by Strange and colleagues
(2008) is important and would like to offer a complementary hypothesis to
explain the reported effect. We propose that personalized photographs were
more powerful stimuli because they fulfilled the personal focus criterion in-
volved in media richness. The personal focus involved in the media richness
criteria is influential in the memory process because it causes humans to
self-reference; people encode more attributes when they are engaged in
self-referent processing than other types of processing (Symons & Johnson,
1997). The greater the amount of information encoded the more similar the
memory becomes to a memory of a physical world event, and the greater
the likelihood that a source monitoring error will occur."This is the key here to me, not regarding false memories, but regarding actual memories. Such an idea lends further weight to the fact that elicitation is enhanced by personal recollection, but may be further confounded if the personal recollection has edits introduced. So, we have a mechanism here for the noise involved in recollection, especially that which is false, not just knocked out due to functional problems, such as random memory lapses.They note that use of media may provide a low-cognitive organisation environment, compared to abstract representations, such as text. This may lead, in fact, to more inaccuracy, as errors are amplified by the nature of the immersion involved.Their summation indicates that children are affected by false narratives, even in a passive viewing, non-interactive manner, with the IVET. This indicates a predictable effect on people of experiencing false stories in IVETs, and leads to the conclusion that such environments should be used with caution, but that they hold promise in enabling better recall, if the stimuli are accurate.